Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800-1453

By Alice-Mary Talbot

In this unprecedented introduction to Byzantine monasticism, based on the Conway Lectures she delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, Alice-Mary Talbot surveys the various forms of monastic life in the Byzantine Empire between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It includes chapters on male monastic communities (mostly cenobitic, but some idiorrhythmic in late Byzantium), nuns and nunneries, hermits and holy mountains, and a final chapter on alternative forms of monasticism, including recluses, stylites, wandering monks, holy fools, nuns disguised as monks, and unaffiliated monks and nuns.

This original monograph does not attempt to be a history of Byzantine monasticism but rather emphasizes the multiplicity of ways in which Byzantine men and women could devote their lives to service to God, with an emphasis on the tension between the two basic modes of monastic life, cenobitic and eremitic. It stresses the individual character of each Byzantine monastic community in contrast to the monastic orders of the Western medieval world, and yet at the same time demonstrates that there were more connections between certain groups of monasteries than previously realized. The most original sections include an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing hermits in the wilderness, and special attention to enclosed monks (recluses) and urban monks and nuns who lived independently outside of monastic complexes. Throughout, Talbot highlights some of the distinctions between the monastic life of men and women, and makes comparisons of Byzantine monasticism with its Western medieval counterpart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268105631

Alice-Mary Talbot

Alice-Mary Talbot is the editor of the Byzantine Greek series of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library and director emeritas of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including service as the executive editor of the three-volume Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium.

Book preview

VARIETIES OF

MONASTIC EXPERIENCE

IN BYZANTIUM, 800–1453

Conway_logo.jpg

The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies 2014

The Medieval Institute gratefully acknowledges the generosity

of Robert M. Conway and his support for the lecture series and

the publications resulting from it.

PREVIOUS TITLES PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES:

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Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer

and Shakespeare (2005)

Ulrich Horst, O.P.

The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching Authority

in the Medieval and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (2006)

Rosamond McKitterick

Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (2006)

Jonathan Riley-Smith

Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land (2010)

A. C. Spearing

Medieval Autographies: The I of the Text (2012)

Barbara Newman

Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (2013)

John Marenbon

Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher

in His Context and Ours (2013)

Sylvia Huot

Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants

in Medieval French Prose Romance (2016)

William J. Courtenay

Rituals for the Dead: Religion and Community

in the Medieval University of Paris (2019)

ALICE-MARY TALBOT

VARIETIES OF

MONASTIC EXPERIENCE

IN BYZANTIUM,

800–1453

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

NOTRE DAME, INDIANA

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Talbot, Alice-Mary Maffry, author.

Title: Varieties of monastic experience in Byzantium, 800–1453 / Alice-Mary Talbot.

Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. | Series: The Conway Lectures in medieval studies, 2014 | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019002371 (print) | LCCN 2019006928 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268105648 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105631 (epub) | ISBN 9780268105617 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105618 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268105624 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105626 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Monastic and religious life—Byzantine Empire. | Byzantine Empire—Church history.

Classification: LCC BX2435 (ebook) | LCC BX2435 .T35 2019 (print) | DDC 271/.81909495—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002371

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

ONE Monks and Male Monastic Communities

TWO Nuns and Nunneries

THREE Hermits and Holy Mountains

FOUR Alternative Modes of Monasticism

Conclusion

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1

Theodore of Stoudios, eleventh-century mosaic, Nea Moni, Chios (photo: Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC)

FIGURE 2

Katholikon at the Great Lavra, Mount Athos (photo: Robert Ousterhout, Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC)

FIGURE 3

Athanasios of Athos, fresco from Protaton, Mount Athos (photo: Miodrag Marković, Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC)

FIGURE 4

Church of the Lips convent, Fenari Isa Camii (photo: Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC)

FIGURE 5

Lincoln College Typikon (Lincoln College gr. 35), fol. 12r: group portrait of nuns from convent of Sure Hope (photo: By permission of the Rector and Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford)

FIGURE 6

Lincoln College Typikon (Lincoln College gr. 35), fol. 11r: Theodora Synadene with her daughter Euphrosyne (photo: By permission of the Rector and Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford)

FIGURE 7

Portrait of Maximos the Hutburner from vita by Ioannikios Kochylas, Vatopedi 470, fol. 1r (photo: Patriarchal Institute of Patristic Studies, Mone Vlatadon, Thessalonike)

FIGURE 8

The hermitages of Saints Gregory and Anthony, close to skete of St. Nicholas of Badova. Meteora, Greece. (photo: Hercules Milas / Alamy Stock Photo)

FIGURE 9

Cell of Neophytos the Recluse at his monastery near Paphos (photo: Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC)

FIGURE 10

Luke the Stylite from Menologion of Basil II (Vaticanus gr. 1613), p. 238 (photo: ©Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)

PREFACE

The theme of this book is the variety of monastic experiences in Byzantium, the many ways in which pious men and women renounced the secular world in order to devote their lives to prayer and the service of Christ. The most basic division between monastics was their choice of the communal life in a cenobitic monastery or a solitary existence as a hermit (eremitic). Many monks espoused both forms of monasticism sequentially during the course of their careers, and there was much discussion in monastic circles about which form of spiritual life was superior. A monastic founder of the early fifteenth century, the patriarch Matthew I (1397–1402, 1403–10), commented, There are many paths of piety for athletes, since our heavenly Father also has ‘many mansions,’ or rather, since there are many paths, there are also many mansions.¹

This book is not intended to be an overall survey of the history of Byzantine monasticism. I have more modest aims here: a typological overview that outlines the varied forms that the Byzantine monastic experience could take, and an examination of the special phenomenon of the Byzantine holy mountain, inhabited by both cenobitic monks and hermits. I emphasize the lifestyle experienced in various monastic environments rather than the differences in structure, organization, and patronage among imperial, patriarchal, and private monasteries (though I do mention this). I also discuss differences between urban and rural monasticism, and between male and female monasteries, and describe unusual institutions, such as double and idiorrhythmic monasteries, and monastic houses restricted to eunuchs. Finally, I investigate those who chose alternative lifestyles: wandering monks, transvestite nuns, holy fools, recluses, stylites, and the shadowy figures of quasi-autonomous monks and nuns who lived in a city or village outside the confines of a monastery and the authority of a superior, sometimes in their own or others’ homes. I cover the ninth to fifteenth centuries and with rare exceptions focus on the heartlands of the middle and late Byzantine Empire, Greece and Anatolia, with occasional forays into Italo-Greek monasticism.

It is somewhat surprising that no book-length synthetic overview of Byzantine monasticism exists in any language. So far, Peter Hatlie has been the only scholar brave enough to attempt to meet this need. In 2007, he published The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–850, but it is limited in geographical scope to the imperial capital and covers only the first half of the history of the empire. He has announced a sequel, Byzantine Monasticism, ca. 850–1450, which promises to expand its geographical coverage beyond Constantinople. The time is now ripe for such a publication, since many of the primary sources on monasticism have been made accessible in recent decades through exemplary editions and translations. I am referring, for example, to the splendid series of the Archives de l’Athos, which is publishing the surviving documents from twenty Athonite monasteries—to date twenty-two volumes have appeared—and to the five-volume collection of monastic foundation rules in translation published by Dumbarton Oaks in 2000, Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents. Also essential are the reference works prepared by the Assumptionist Fathers in Paris, such as Raymond Janin’s monumental tomes on the monasteries and churches of Constantinople and the provinces, and the Regestes of the patriarchal acts edited by Venance Grumel, Vitalien Laurent, and Jean Darrouzès. The other indispensable sources for this study are the numerous saints’ lives published over many years in Brussels by the Bollandists in the Acta Sanctorum, Analecta Bollandiana, and volumes of the Subsidia Hagiographica. These have been supplemented in recent years by a spate of English translations of Byzantine hagiographical texts in different series.

I have long had an interest in Byzantine monasticism, especially in convents for nuns, and in the tensions between the communal regimen of the cenobitic monastery and the solitary life of the hermit; as a result, much of my scholarship has involved the editing and translation of texts relating to monastic rules and the lives of monks and nuns. Thus, in 2011 when I was invited by the late and lamented Olivia Remie Constable to deliver the 2014 Conway Lectures at the University of Notre Dame, I thought the time was right to focus on the forms of Byzantine monasticism that prevailed during the second half of the Byzantine Empire, approximately 800–1453. The three lectures I delivered—on cenobitic monks, nuns, and hermits—have been revised and expanded and make up the first three chapters of this book, to which I have added a fourth chapter on alternative forms of monasticism. I also include an introduction that briefly sketches out the origins and history of monastic institutions in the Byzantine world. Because I hope that a book published in the Conway Lecture Series will attract an audience of Western medievalists and of Byzantinists, wherever possible I have referenced primary sources available in English translation, but have also included citations of the original Greek texts in the footnotes. For texts available only in Greek, I have provided my own translations.

Sadly, by the time I visited Notre Dame in the fall of 2014, Remie had suffered an untimely death, but I was warmly hosted by John van Engen, who took over her duties as director of the Medieval Institute and ensured that my stay on campus was enjoyable and stimulating. I am also grateful to Roberta Baranowski, associate director of the Medieval Institute, who took care of all the practical arrangements, and, among others, to Thomas Noble, Alexis Torrance, Susan Sheridan, and Charles Yost, all of whom warmly welcomed me to the university.

In the preparation of this book I have greatly benefited from insights into contemporary Orthodox monasticism on Mount Athos provided by Father Maximos Constas of Simonopetra and Father Damaskenos of Xenophontos (Jaakko Olkinuora), and I thank them for the information they have so kindly provided. I am particularly grateful to Nathanael Aschenbrenner, a Tyler fellow at Dumbarton Oaks from 2015 to 2017, who generously offered to review a first draft of this work and made many insightful suggestions for improvement. I should also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers and my editor at the University of Notre Dame Press, Stephen Little, and copyeditor Scott Barker. Konstantina Karterouli, postdoctoral fellow in Byzantine art history at Dumbarton Oaks’ Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, provided generous assistance in identifying appropriate photos for this book and furnished digital images. Robert Ousterhout and Miodrag Markovic´ graciously provided permission for me to reproduce their photographs.

Finally, I should like to acknowledge my debt to the late Alexander Kazhdan, my mentor, colleague, and friend for almost twenty years at Dumbarton Oaks until his death in 1997. During our long years of association and collaboration, I learned much from him about Byzantine hagiography, and I was introduced to his theories on the role of individualism in Byzantine society. His ideas have greatly influenced the direction of my research into Byzantine monasticism, and I should like to dedicate this book to his memory.

ABBREVIATIONS

AASS = Acta Sanctorum, 71 vols. (Paris: Victor Palme, 1863–1940)

BHG = Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca, 3rd ed., ed. François Halkin (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957)

BMFD = Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, ed. John P. Thomas and Angela C. Hero, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000)

CIC = Corpus iuris civilis, ed. Paul Krueger, Theodor Mommsen, et al., 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1928–1929)

CPG = Corpus paroemiographorum Graecorum, ed. Ernst L. von Leutsch and Friedrich G. Schneidewin, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck et Ruprecht, 1839–1851, reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1965)

Janin, Constantinople byzantine = Raymond Janin, Constantinople byzantine: Développement urbain et répertoire topographique (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines, 1964)

Janin, Eglises CP = Raymond Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique de l’empire byzantin. I. Le siège de Constantinople et le patriarcat oecuménique. III. Les églises et les monastères (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines, 1969)

Janin, Grands centres = Raymond Janin, Les églises et les monastères des grands centres byzantins (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines, 1975)

LbG = Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität, besonders des 9.–12. Jahrhunderts, ed. Erich Trapp et al., 8 fasc. (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994–2017)

MM = Acta et diplomata graeca medii aevi sacra et profana, ed. Franz Miklosich and Joseph Müller, 6 vols. (Vienna: C. Gerold, 1860–1890)

ODB = Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan et al., 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)

PG = Patrologiae cursus completus, series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 161 vols. (Paris: Migne, 1857–1866)

PGL = A Patristic Greek Lexicon, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961)

PLP = Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, ed. Erich Trapp, 12 vols. (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1976–1996)

PmbZ = Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit, ed. Ralph-Johannes Lilie et al., series 1, 6 vols., series 2, 9 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998–2013)

RegPatr = Les regestes des actes du Patriarcat de Constantinople, ed. Venance Grumel, Vitalien Laurent, and Jean Darrouzès, 7 fasc. (Istanbul: Socii Assumptionistae Chalcedonenses; Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines, 1932–1991)

RPK = Das Register des Patriarchats von Konstantinopel, ed. Herbert Hunger, Otto Kresten, et al. (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981–)

SynaxCP = Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae: Propylaeum ad Acta Sanctorum Novembris, ed. Hippolyte Delehaye (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902)

INTRODUCTION

Monasticism was an essential feature of Byzantine civilization throughout the eleven centuries of its empire, centered in the new Christian capital of Constantinople, founded in 330 by Emperor Constantine I (r. 306–37). Monasteries were established to provide a community where especially devout Byzantines might seclude themselves from the secular world to pray for their own salvation and that of their fellow Christians. Monks served as spiritual fathers to local laypeople who attended the liturgy at the monastery and who, if they became institutional benefactors, might be buried in the main church and commemorated in annual services on the anniversary of their death. Monastic institutions played a prominent role in cities, where they carried out social services in addition to their spiritual function, and in the countryside, where their vast estates were a key element in the agricultural economy of the empire. Some Byzantines took vows as teenagers and spent almost their entire lives in the cloister, while others retired to monasteries in the final phases of life, most often after the death of a spouse. Some monasteries were small and poor, others very large and well-endowed, able to support artistic and intellectual activities, such as icon painting, copying of manuscripts, and the composition of hymns, saints’ lives, and theological treatises.

THE ORIGINS OF MONASTICISM

The term monasticism is derived from the Greek word monazein, meaning to live alone. Christian monasticism began in the eastern Mediterranean in the late third century, in the deserts of Egypt where devout believers, such as St. Anthony the Great (ca. 251–356) and Paul the First Hermit (d. ca. 341), withdrew from the world to lead a life of solitary prayer and asceticism, often termed eremitism from the Greek word eremos, meaning desert, wilderness, or anchoritism, from the Greek word anachoresis, meaning withdrawal, retirement from the world. As these hermits attracted disciples, cenobitic monasteries for men and women were established, from the fourth century on, with a superior to whom the monks and nuns owed absolute obedience. The term cenobitic derives from the Greek words koinos bios, meaning common/communal life, and it refers to monks and nuns who lived in a community under the leadership of an abbot rather than as solitaries. In Upper Egypt was founded the Pachomian federation of both male and female monasteries, with a rule attributed to the Coptic monastic leader Pachomios, who died in 346. In the late fourth and first half of the fifth century appeared the dominant figure of Abbot Shenoute (ca. 350–466), who expanded the White Monastery near Sohag into an enormous complex housing more than 2,000 monks and 1,800 nuns.

Meanwhile, Basil of Caesarea (ca. 329–79), one of the so-called Cappadocian fathers, was promoting cenobitic monasticism in Anatolia, in present-day Turkey; in the 360s or 370s he composed two sets of general rules, preserved in a longer and shorter version.¹ Also in the fourth century, monasteries began to be founded in Palestine, where the archaeological remains of numerous urban and rural complexes have been surveyed or excavated; a number of the sites have been identified as convents.² Monasticism was somewhat slower to establish itself in Syria, which was to become celebrated for the extreme asceticism of the stylites, or pillar saints, who lived atop columns.³ One of the most well-known stylites was Symeon Stylite the Elder, who stood on his column at Qalʿat Semʿān, not far from Antioch, for many years until his death in 459.

Yet another type of foundation with Egyptian origins developed in Greater Syria, the lavra, which combined features of eremitic and cenobitic life. An example is the famed lavra of St. Sabas (Mar Saba) near Jerusalem, founded in the late fifth century.⁴ Lavrai typically had a group of dispersed monastic cells, often caves in a nearby cliff face, associated with a central complex housing a church, refectory, common hall, and outbuildings. Lavriot monks resided in their individual scattered cells during the week but owed obedience to a common superior. They would return to the lavra on weekends to attend the liturgy, dine in the refectory, and pick up food provisions and raw materials for handwork for the coming week.

Monasticism also began to spread to Constantinople in the second half of the fourth century, and numerous institutions had been founded by the mid-fifth century.⁵ Gilbert Dagron has estimated that by the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 there were 10,000 to 15,000 monks in the region of the capital.⁶ A century later, under the rule of Justinian I (r. 527–65), there were almost seventy monasteries in the city itself, and many more in its suburbs, thirty-nine, for example, in Chalcedon on the Asian shore of the Bosporos.⁷ The foundation of monasteries in mainland Greece and the southern Balkans occurred much more slowly.

The fifth century also saw the appearance of the first holy mountains in Anatolia.⁸ Such mountains were particularly attractive to hermits, but they also featured one or more cenobitic monasteries.⁹ Mount St. Auxentios, on a hill southeast of Chalcedon, took its name from a Syrian monk named Auxentios (d. ca. 470), who spent the last twenty years of his life as a hermit in a cave on the mountain. It later attracted other solitaries, and a nunnery was founded there around 460, followed much later by the monastery of St. Stephen the Younger, a monk allegedly martyred for his support of icon veneration in 765.¹⁰ Bithynian Mount Olympos, near Prousa (to be distinguished from its more famous namesake in Thessaly), also attracted hermits in late antiquity. At least one monastery is attested in the region in the fifth century, but it was most active as a monastic center during the eighth to tenth centuries; its monks were celebrated for their opposition to iconoclasm, that is, the rejection of image veneration.¹¹ Other holy mountains appeared in Anatolia in the eighth century (Latros, near Miletos), tenth century (Kyminas, in Bithynia), and eleventh century (Galesion, near Ephesos), while Athos in Macedonia was first settled by hermits in the ninth century; cenobitic monasteries began to appear there in the tenth century.¹²

In late antiquity, monasticism spread to Western Europe through the agency of such intermediaries as John Cassian (d. after 432), a monk of Scythian origin who received his monastic training in Palestine and Egypt and then moved west in the early fifth century to found two monasteries in Provence. His writings in Latin introduced into Western Europe accounts of monastic life in the eastern Mediterranean world. St. Benedict of Nursia (480–543/47), founder of numerous Italian monasteries, including Monte Cassino, south of Rome, composed his extremely influential rule in the mid-sixth century.¹³ At first, Benedict’s rule was just one of several competing monastic rules in the West, but during the Carolingian period it gained ascendancy and became the dominant form of regulation in early medieval Europe.

Around the sixth century, monasticism in the Byzantine East and medieval West began to diverge in significant ways. In every cenobitic monastery, where the monks lived in community, there were certain fundamental principles in both East and West: the authority of the superior to whom each monk owed absolute obedience; the necessity for observance of the regulations in the monastic rule; a lifestyle based on communal prayer in the church and communal meals in the refectory; the division of the monks into two groups: the choir monks and those in charge of household duties.

The most important distinction to emerge between Eastern and Western monasticism was the absence in Byzantium of separate monastic orders, such as one finds in the medieval West, the Benedictines, for example, and the Cistercians, Dominicans, and Franciscans, who appeared later in the high Middle Ages. With few exceptions, each Byzantine monastery was an individual and separate entity, with its own rule, or typikon, that prescribed the regulations for the organization and administration of that specific monastic foundation. This meant there could be a wide variety in the procedures for the election of a superior, for instance, or the length of the novitiate or dietary restrictions on fast days. In the earlier scholarly literature, however, as recently as 1960, there were still misleading references to the Basilian Order of monks in Byzantium, under the misguided impression that the so-called Ascetic Rules of Basil, the fourth-century Church father and bishop of Caesarea, laid the foundations for a single monastic order in the East.¹⁴ John Thomas’s careful comparison of the Longer and Shorter Rules of Basil with medieval Byzantine typika demonstrates that Basil’s rules were certainly influential for certain fundamental aspects of monastic life in middle and late Byzantium, but that later monastery founders often disregarded many of Basil’s precepts.¹⁵

BYZANTINE MONASTICISM FROM THE NINTH TO FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

I focus this study on the second half of the Byzantine Empire, the ninth century through the first half of the fifteenth century (800–1453), for several reasons. First of all, the first quarter of the ninth century was a turning point in the history of Byzantine monasticism, a period of intense monastic reform under the leadership of Theodore, superior of the Stoudios monastery in Constantinople. Theodore sought to restore a more rigorous form of cenobitism, emphasizing manual labor and self-sufficiency. The monastic regulations he formulated were to prove a basic model for subsequent monastic establishments. The year 1453 marked the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks and the effective end of the Byzantine Empire. Although many rural monasteries, especially on Mount Athos, continued to function during the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans, most urban monasteries failed to survive. A few monasteries in the capital remained active following the conquest, but many were closed or destroyed, and today the only remains are their churches, or katholika, now turned into museums or mosques. As for geographical range, I focus on the core territory of medieval Byzantium, that is, Greece, western Anatolia, and the capital, Constantinople, with occasional allusions to Italo-Greek monasticism in southern Italy.

The years 800–1453 are better documented than earlier centuries with regard to monastic history because almost all the surviving monastic foundation documents date from this period, as do the archival acts from Mount Athos. No foundation document prior to the seventh century survives for an individual Byzantine monastery.¹⁶ The rules devised by earlier monastic founders may have been passed down orally from one generation of monks to another in the early centuries of Byzantine monasticism, but not until the ninth century did it become the norm for the regulations to be set down in a codified form called a typikon. The earliest such texts to be preserved are two very short rules: an early seventh-century testament for a monastery near Thebes in Egypt, and a late eighth-century typikon for a monastery on the island of Pantelleria near Sicily.¹⁷ In the ninth century, a short but seminal document appeared, the so-called Testament of Theodore of Stoudios. This is actually a compilation of excerpts from previous testaments and other compositions of Theodore, most probably drafted by his successor Naukratios shortly after his death in 826, outlining Theodore’s vision of the organization of a monastery restored on strict cenobitic principles;¹⁸ a few years later, sometime after 842, a more fully developed typikon was composed.¹⁹ The rules Theodore devised for Stoudios were to influence monastic organization and routines for many years to come. A subsequent series of Greek monastic foundation documents (more than sixty are preserved overall), which continues up to the fifteenth century, illuminates the diversity of regimens in cenobitic houses. These texts also enable scholars to place on a firmer basis the study of Byzantine monasticism during the second half of the empire and to draw on sources beyond the hagiographies of monastic founders.

Among the many distinctions between monasteries illuminated by the texts of typika was the nature of their foundation, patronage, and governance: imperial, patriarchal, private, and independent or self-governing. Imperial monasteries were founded by an emperor or member of the imperial family and can be traced back to the sixth century.²⁰ The typika for imperial foundations attest to some of the basic characteristics of this type of monastery: they were well-endowed and offered the opportunity of a comfortable life in seclusion for relatives of the imperial donor. Sometimes they might be led by a holy man, such as Athanasios at the Great Lavra on Mount Athos, who was given much autonomy in his administration.²¹ Patriarchal monasteries were founded by the patriarch, were independent of the local bishop, and provided revenues for the patriarchate.²² Most monasteries were in fact private foundations, often established by wealthy individuals to provide a place for their burial and the assurance of prayers for their salvation and commemorative services by monks or nuns.²³ These institutions were most often supported by the generous endowment of landed properties. A fourth type of monastery, independent or self-governing, first appeared in the tenth century. The superior and steward of such a monastery managed its properties and endowment without interference from the donor.²⁴ The typika of these monasteries stressed self-governance, that is, the selection of the superior by the community without any intervention by the patron.

There were significant differences in the sizes of Byzantine monasteries. The minimum number of monks according to canon law was three, and many monasteries in fact were small, with only a few monks. Others were of moderate size, with twenty-four or thirty monks or nuns, while a few, especially in Constantinople or on Mount Athos, might have a hundred or even several hundred inhabitants.²⁵

The overall number of monasteries in Byzantium in any given century is impossible to determine for lack of sufficient evidence. Some scholars have ventured an attempt nonetheless, but the figures they propose must be treated with caution. Peter Charanis, for example, tallied about 240 monasteries from the Byzantine centuries that are known by name, and he argued that there must have been countless others, perhaps as many as 7,000.²⁶ A few years later, Anthony Bryer compiled a census of 700 recorded monasteries within the twelfth-century borders of the empire.²⁷ Raymond Janin’s survey listed 325 monasteries in and around Constantinople over the eleven centuries of the empire’s existence.²⁸

Although the size and endowments of monasteries varied widely, many monastic institutions accumulated vast landed properties, through gifts from pious patrons or through deliberate consolidation of neighboring estates by purchase or exchange. Such properties also included significant urban holdings, such as houses and workshops that provided rental income, or other revenue sources, such as salt pans and mines. Monastic administrators had to be skilled financial managers, and their daily concerns were far removed from those of their brethren, who chose a life of solitary withdrawal into the wilderness for spiritual contemplation.

Monastic life, in its various forms, continued to attract Byzantine men and women until the very end of the empire; in fact, as the empire declined, lost territory, and faced significant economic challenges, many monasteries retained their wealth and power, and monks played a prominent role in intellectual life and in the Church hierarchy, especially as patriarchs.

SOURCES ON MONASTICISM

A rich variety of sources is available to the historian of middle and late Byzantine monasticism, that is, from the ninth to fifteenth centuries.²⁹ At the head of the list should come monastic foundation documents, an assortment of texts that includes founders’ testaments and rules; the latter are often referred to as typika, a generic term for the regulations governing daily life and liturgical observances in a monastery. The so-called ktetorika typika contain rules established by the founders (ktetores) or early abbots for all aspects of monastic routine; they